(no subject)

[David Lee]

On Thu, 14 Mar 2002, Steve Cleveland wrote:

> I'm running Samba 2.2.2 on Solaris 8 in a college environment with
> approximately 200 PC workstations.  The Solaris server is a Sunfire 280R
> 2x750MHz, and 4GB RAM.
> 
> The end of the term is here, and the labs are near capacity for most of
> the day.  As the usage has gone up, we've started to experience a lot of
> problems.  I've been tracking the number of smbd processes and as they
> reach 300+, it suddenly jumps to ~400, the load on the server jumps to
> around 70 (from 2 or 3) and all of the processes disconnect from the
> parent.
> 
> I basically have to kill off the processes by hand and restart samba to
> get things straightened out.

(Aside:  Do you know the command "pkill" in the more recent Solaris
releases?  A single "pkill smbd" command can assist such firefighting.) 

> [...]
> 
> If someone can explain these errors and tell me if they could cause the
> errors I am seeing, I would greatly appreciate it!

Executive summary: run (don't walk) to your nearest Samba mirror and get
release 2.2.3a .

Detail:  Problems relating to oplocks, and to such smbd-avalanching have
been noticeable in the the combination of Solaris and the evolving 2.2.x
samba. By release 2.2.2 things were much better, but there were still a
couple of significant remaining problems in precisely these areas.

Jeremy has continued to do much work in this area.  Sometime after 2.2.2
was released, he had one of those "Eureka!" moments (forgive poetic
licence), and found and fixed the smbd-avalanching bug.  This fix was
incorporated into Samba 2.2.3a .  So I strongly recommend that you plan a
migration from 2.2.2 up 2.2.3a . 

Hope that helps.

-- 

:  David Lee                                I.T. Service          :
:  Systems Programmer                       Computer Centre       :
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